Like the broad discipline of anthropology, cultural ecology is apparently a product both of Western tradition and of colonialism. It can also be said to be a later product of human thought. The concept of ecology was not in existence before the time of the great Greek philosophers and even the Greek thinkers themselves were still unable to offer a conceptual analysis of cultural ecology. Such an analysis did not appear until the nineteenth century when the German anthropogeographer, Ratzel , and his American colleague, Mason (Helm 1962:630) emphasized the importance of habitat in effecting cultural diversity and distributions. Later, however, the concept developed into a focused area of investigation which anthropologists call “cultural ecology”